Theater Review: A.R.T.’s 'Marie Antoinette' offers up more than cake

If you’re feeling left out because you’re not among the top 1 percent of the wealthiest people in our country, American’s Repertory Theatre’s witty, saucy, and ultimately moving production of "Marie Antoinette" will puncture that myth for you. You can be relieved of the awful burden!

If you’re feeling left out because you’re not among the top 1 percent of the wealthiest people in our country, American’s Repertory Theatre’s witty, saucy, and ultimately moving production of "Marie Antoinette" will puncture that myth for you. You can be relieved of the awful burden!

You won’t need to hear more than the first few lines of David Adjmi’s play to realize that it deftly weaves the shallow, self-absorbed life of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI at Versailles with the shallow, self-absorbed life of our own society at its worst.

The play’s language is modern and hip and the music between several early scenes is a lively hip-hop, while the story and elegant costumes are more or less historical, when they’re not parodying themselves. It gives us a chance to laugh and cringe at ourselves without feeling overly embarrassed.

Marie and her two friends eating pastries and tea for breakfast in the opening scene could be gossiping Valley Girls, if it weren’t for the frilly dresses that swallow them up, their beehive hairdos rising heavenward, and the servants hovering over them.

"You’re so Austrian," one friend says to Marie, who indeed was shipped from Austria at the age of 14 to be King Louis’ wife. Obviously, those weren’t the actual words used at Versailles, but no doubt the attitude was similar.

In the opening scene, we also get hints of what will eventually make the show deeper and more heartfelt than the series of "Saturday Night Live" skits it tends to become throughout the first act. Marie has dispensed with her bone corset, and she complains about feeling as if she’s pressed between two glass slides. What she really wants to be is the free butterfly that her lover, Axel Fersen, sees her as, and which she attempts to embody in a few ballet steps as her courtesans help her change clothes. The real strength of the play is the chance to experience what Marie feels and faces and to empathize with her, which comes mostly in the second act.

Meanwhile, it’s the wit and cleverness that sustains the play until it begins to drag as it approaches intermission. Marie constantly skewers King Louis, who was not giving her children, and instead acts like a child himself, towing a gold wagon of timepieces that fascinate him. "Has it never occurred to you to run France?" Marie says to him.

Some of the most clever and charming moments involve a horse straight from a carousel that is wheeled up to Marie and she hops on, and a flock of puppet sheep that an actor manipulates and speaks for, at one point crudely enough to be intentionally disturbing.

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The show, a co-production with Yale Repertory Theater and well directed by Rebecca Taichman, hits its stride when the French turn against their king and queen, represented expressionistically by a mountain of coal falling on Marie. In an exquisitely lit and excruciating scene, a revolutionary soldier demands all of the jewelry she’s wearing. After handing it over, all she can say is, "Who will pour my bath?" That says it all. As does a scene in which Marie and Louis are captured as they ask farmers whether windmills are merely for beauty or actually do something.

Brooke Bloom does well, as a good, young actor should, at portraying Maria Antoinette’s hip, superficiality and her desire for something more. But her performance soars when she explores the emotional depths of Marie being stripped of everything she has known. This finally becomes theater that will fully engage you.

Steven Rattazzi portrays Louis XVI as a lost and self-absorbed child, but doesn’t get a chance to show what he can do as an actor. Andrew Cekala, a young actor from Weston who plays the Dauphin, makes Marie’s end all the more tragic as he can’t fully comprehend what they are facing.

As expected, "Marie Antoinette" exposes uber-wealth and power as not all they’re cracked up to be. It shows Marie and Louis as more or less helpless pawns in an evolving society. But most of all it makes us feel for Marie as a fellow human being rather than want to call for her head.